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AUSTIN ANSWERED: Why doesn’t city have more east-west highways?

AUSTIN ANSWERED: Why doesn’t city have more east-west highways?

Businesses and homes are stacked alongside Woodrow Avenue and West Koenig Lane in North Austin. Ricardo B. Brazziell / AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The question is one that Austin transportation officials stopped asking about a generation ago: What can be done to make it easier to travel east-west across Central Austin?

If that concern has fallen off the official agenda, extinguished by the political difficulty of cutting roads through long-established neighborhoods, it remains very much on the minds of drivers who have to plod through narrow arteries built for a much smaller city. Austin regularly shows up near the top of transportation researchers’ lists for worst traffic congestion in the country.

But that question of why Austin doesn’t have more east-west thoroughfares, which a Statesman reader raised as part of our Austin Answered series, was most definitely on the minds of transportation planners from about 1960 to beyond 1990.

And for modern Austinites, the answers they came up with — none of which ever moved beyond maps and innumerable tense public meetings — might be somewhat astonishing.